TWD RSS feeds

Dear Word Detective: I’m searching for the meaning of the expression “out for a duck,” as used in “The first time Milne went to see his son play in a school cricket match, he was out for a duck, not scoring a single run.” — Ehrenberg H. Peter.

Ah yes, as the great existential philosopher Chico Marx once put it, “Why a duck? Why not a chicken?” Of course, in the film (Cocoanuts, 1929), Chico has misunderstood Groucho saying “viaduct,” and the dialogue then descends into Chico wondering why Groucho needs a Ford to cross the river when he has a horse, but “Why a duck?” is about all we have time for at the moment. The relevant clip, like every other worthy bit of human history, can be found on YouTube. While you’re there, check out some clips from the Marx Brothers’ subsequent film “Duck Soup.” The boys seem to have had a thing for ducks.

But who among us, as John Kerry so famously is said to have said, does not enjoy ducks? The English language certainly does. The humble but endearing waterfowl we know as the “duck” has contributed dozens of colorful phrases to our speech. When we put our affairs in order, we say we have “all our ducks in a row” (as a mother duck leads her brood of ducklings), we shed adversity “like water off a duck’s back,” we learn a new job (we hope) “like a duck takes to water” (easily), we greet a gloomy sky as “a good day for a duck” but regard sunshine as “ducky” (from the use of “little duck” and similar terms as endearments), and if something is very easy, we declare it “duck soup” (the origin of which is, sadly, a complete mystery).

Our modern English word “duck” comes from the Old English “ducan,” which did not, interestingly, mean any sort of bird. “Ducan” was a verb meaning “to plunge underwater suddenly, to dive or dip.” The name “duck” for the fowl came from its habit of feeding by “ducking,” plunging its head into the water. So when you have to “duck” your head when climbing into a compact car, don’t blame the ducks for bad design.

The phrase you cite as an example of “out for a duck” actually comes from an account of the strained relationship between A.A. Milne, author of “Winnie the Pooh” and other works, and his son Christopher Robin Milne, who starred in many of his father’s stories. The fact that the younger Milne failed to score in that cricket match was evidently a source of great disappointment to both him and his father.

“Duck” as slang for scoring no hits (or meaning a player who scores no hits) originated in cricket in the mid-19th century, but is now used in other sports as well. “Duck” in this sense is short for “duck’s egg,” meaning the zero placed beside the player’s name in scoring sheets. It first appeared in schoolboy slang in Britain, where it is also used to mean “nothing” in a general sense. To finally score after a time at “duck” in cricket is to “break one’s duck,” but if that doesn’t happen and the game concludes with a player not having scored even once, that hapless soul is said to be “out for a duck.” In the US, we more simply refer to zero as a “goose egg.”

Dear Word Detective: In “True Grit” by Charles Portis, a horse trader describes the murderer Tom Clancy as being “on the scout” in the Indian Territory. I’ve never seen “scout” used in such a way. It certainly seems from the context that “scout” here means “hiding out” or “on the lam,” and not “exploring” as is the more common meaning of the word today. Perhaps you can shed some light on this use of the word? — Bill Lundeberg.

That’s an interesting question, and that use of “scout” strikes me as a bit odd, too. I must admit that my knowledge of “scouts” and what they do is drawn almost entirely from the TV “horse operas” of my youth (e.g., Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, and similar pacifist fare). There was also the occasional historical painting depicting some famous scout standing on an outcropping of rock pointing to another, apparently identical, outcropping of rock in the distance. Even at the age of ten, doing that for a living seemed boring to me. And that buckskin clothing looked scratchy.

There are actually, and somewhat surprisingly, several distinct “scout” nouns in English, plus two verbs. The oldest noun, dating back to around 1400, is an obsolete “scout” meaning “overhanging rock,” from the Old Norse “skute,” which is related to the verb “to shoot.” I just report this stuff, folks. Next up are “scouts” meaning “a flat-bottomed boat,” “a kind of sea bird,” and “scout” as a term of contempt, which seems to have been imported from Scandinavia as a verb meaning “to mock” and is also related to the verb “to shoot” (and possibly “to shout”). College servants at Harvard, Yale and Oxford have also been known as “scouts” since the 18th century.

None of those, with the possible exception of “scout” meaning “servant,” however, seem to be connected to “scout” in the “explorer” sense. That “scout” comes from the Old French “escouter,” meaning “to listen,” which itself came ultimately from the Latin “auscultare,” also meaning “to listen.” That “listening” meaning of “scout” is the key to the word.

To “scout” when the verb first appeared in English around 1400 was not to map out the best routes for travel and rate restaurants along the way, but to perform what we today would probably call “espionage.” A “scout” was a spy who prowled around in search of information, specifically a soldier sent in advance of the main force of an army in order to locate the enemy and report back to his superiors (“Others from the dawning Hills Lookd round, and Scouts each Coast light-armed scoure, Each quarter, to descrie the distant foe,” Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667).

This military sense of “scout” soon broadened to mean “a person sent out to gather information” in a general sense, largely devoid of those “sneaky spy” overtones, and in many uses (as in the once-popular wagon train dramas), a “scout” was simply a knowledgeable rider who investigated the trail ahead to insure the travelers’ safety. Eventually we developed such wholesome uses of “scout” as in “Boy Scouts” and “Girl Scouts,” which led, in the early 20th century, to the slang use of “good scout” to mean an honest, reliable person. The same period saw the rise of the slightly-less-wholesome “talent scouts” and “sports scouts” prowling obscure bars and small-town football fields looking for the Next Big Thing (“Vaudeville scouts approached us. Our pictures were in the papers,” Paul Whiteman, 1926).

The phrase “on the scout” (or “in the scout”) dates back to the 17th century, and means to be acting as a “scout” in the original sense of a spy or surreptitious observer (“Capt. Baker … without my leave, went upon a scout and … was shot,” 1775). In the sense that you mention, I’d say that the author meant that the criminal was traveling “as a scout would,” i.e., secretly, trying to avoid detection, definitely on the lam in a sneaky fashion, looking for nothing except a way to avoid being caught.

Dear Word Detective: Can one use “aegis” and “purview” in the same sentence or would that constitute a redundancy? I want to write a letter to the FDA proposing that certain aspects of the cultivation, licensing, sale, use and taxation of marijuana should fall under their jurisdiction. — Dick Stacy.

Hmm. Are you sure you want to do that? Chances are you’ll just get a boilerplate form letter response, you know. But there’s also the chance that it’ll be delivered by guys wearing body armor and driving a tank. Out where I live they’ve taken to sending SWAT teams out at 4 am to talk to people adjudged to be using implausibly large amounts of electricity. Maybe it has to do with the light bulb law, ya think? Bright lights, big trouble, as Reddy Kilowatt would say.

Using “aegis” and “purview” in the same sentence wouldn’t be truly redundant, because the words are not precise synonyms. They are similar in meaning, however, so the syntactic logistics of usage might be tricky. You don’t want to distress the poor cubicle rats at the FDA.

“Aegis” and “purview” both first appeared in English in the 15th century. “Purview” was originally a legal term meaning the “substance and intent” of a statute, what the FDA would call the “active ingredients” of the law. Our English “purview” comes from the Anglo-French phrase “purveu est ke,” meaning “it is provided that,” which was a standard clause preceding the specific terms of a law. Over the next few centuries, “purview” expanded to mean “scope, authority, supervision” of nearly any office, agency, person, etc., which is the sense most often seen today. Many of the more general modern uses of “purview” seem to have been influenced by the “view” part of the word, which has lent “purview” a connotation of “oversight or range of vision,” both figurative and literal (“In a twinkling she was hidden by the turn [of the road] from the purview of the castle,” 1903). But usually “purview” just means “authority or control.”

“Aegis” (pronounced either “ee-jis” or “ay-jis,” your choice) is actually a Latin word, from the Greek “Aigis,” the name of the shield of Zeus in Greek mythology. “Aigis” is presumed to come from “aix,” meaning “goat” (specifically “aigos,” or “of goat”), because the shield was made of goatskin. (“Shield” in this context includes protective clothing, which makes that “goatskin” a bit more plausible.)

“Aegis” was initially used in English in specific reference to Greek mythology, but by the mid-18th century it came to be used in a figurative sense to mean “impregnable defense or shield” or, more generally, “the backing or support of a person, institution, etc.” (“He cast over them the aegis of his own mighty name,” 1865). “Aegis” is often used in the phrase “under the aegis of,” meaning “under the control, auspices or authority of” a person, agency, government, etc. (“More than half of the pupils studied were enrolled at schools under the aegis of the Chicago International Charter School,” 2006). “Aegis” is also often used in the sense of “strong influence or guidance” or even “control.” All these figurative uses of “aegis” only began to appear in the 1930s, and were roundly denounced by usage traditionalists even in the 1960s, but are considered standard today.

So “aegis” and “purview” share a bailiwick and nearly overlap in sense at times, but there remains a shade of difference. In terms of the FDA, for example, the classification of drugs falls within their “purview,” but a change in the legal status of a drug would be done under their “aegis,” i.e., with their official approval. You could say that “purview” is the scope of their authority and that “aegis” describes the exercise of that authority or control.